Almost to the day half a year after the demise of Luciano
Pavarotti, his older tenor colleague Giuseppe Di Stefano passed
away on 3 March 2008. Pavarotti openly
declared his admiration for Di Stefano, whom he tried to emulate,
not so much in voice character but in the whole-hearted
involvement in everything that he sang.

Giuseppe Di
Stefano was born on 24 July 1921
in a village near Catania
in Sicily. He made his operatic debut in 1946 at Reggio Emilia –
the same place where Pavarotti made his debut fifteen years
later. There as well as at his La Scala debut a year later he sang
Des Grieux in Massenet’s Manon, a role that suited his
beautiful lyric tenor to perfection. Within another year he bowed
at the Metropolitan Opera in New York
as the Duke in Rigoletto and was a mainstay in New York
for years to come. His British debut was in Edinburgh
in 1957 and he eventually came to Covent Garden in 1961. Bu then
his voice was already in decline, due to ill-advised choice of too
heavy roles too early in his career, but also to in some respects
faulty technique. His open delivery of high fortissimo notes,
which can be heard on many of his recordings, took its toll and
the intensity of his readings too often exposed him to overloading
the voice. His earliest recordings, from November and December
1947, including arias from Manon, Mignon, Tosca and
L’Arlesiana, have rarely been surpassed for tonal beauty and
elegant phrasing, but just a few years into the 1950s it is
possible to detect tear and wear to the voice, a pinched quality
to some notes under strain and sometimes a bleating sound. But
just as often he was able to make superb performances and only a
couple of days before his death was announced I listened to the
complete recordings of Il trovatore and Un ballo in
maschera, both recorded within a few weeks in the autumn of
1956 with Maria Callas as the heroine, and in both recordings he
was in splendid shape.

It was as stage partner to Maria Callas that he became best known
and they mutually triggered each other to give their best. They
also sang in concert and recorded ten complete operas together.

By the mid-1960s Di Stefano’s operatic career was practically
over, but he sang some operetta and as late as 1992 he appeared as
the Emperor in Turandot

In November
2004 he was seriously injured after an attack by unknown
perpetrators in his home in Diani Beach,
Kenya. His condition was critical for quite some time and after
operations he was flown to a hospital in Milan. It was also there
that he died.

Giuseppe Di Stefano will be remembered as one of the most charming
and intense lyric tenors of the late 1940s and the greater part of
the 1950s. The honeyed pianissimo and the perfect enunciation were
his hallmarks. Besides the ten operas with Callas there is also a
splendid L’Elisir d’amore (Decca), Madama Butterfly
with Victoria de los Angeles, La
traviata with Antonietta Stella and a late Tosca with
Leontyne Price, conducted by Herbert von Karajan, which is almost
on a par with the famous recording with Callas, Gobbi and Victor
De Sabata. Lovers of Neapolitan songs will also be richly rewarded
when searching Di Stefano’s discography.

Personally, the duet Teco io sto from the second act
of Un ballo in maschera, with Di Stefano and Callas, will
forever stand out as some of the most passionate moments ever
recorded. There we find much of the essence of the art of Giuseppe
Di Stefano.